I would have posted this sooner but I ended up locked in a two-hour Twitter battle over it....

Oh. Okay. He was doing important things over in Twitter. Twitter is a great way to get people who write too much to throw much of their time and energy down the rathole. There's no way I'm going to go in there and try to piece together that conversation. Whatever it was, it doesn't matter anymore.

But here's the belated response on the blog:

The RNC does occasionally display suicidal tendencies... but I can’t believe they intended to call Pelosi a “pussy” knowing how offensive it is, how many votes it could cost them, and how outrageously outraged the media would be on her behalf as a way of changing the subject from her lies about waterboarding.

I think they intended to call Democrats pussies. That's why it ends with the on-screen words "Democrats Galore." The idea is: The Democrats are pussies — meaning sissies. But it just doesn't work because that's not the way "pussy" is meant in "Pussy Galore."

68 comments:

I saw that yesterday and thought that it was a take off on the terrorist's view of her weakness in face of political power coming out of the barrell of guns. But I am not very sensitive to the women's fears of being found irrelevent to politics in time of war.

Althouse is right: The analogy isn't Pelosi = Pussy Galore. The analogy is the CIA = James Bond.

Only at the very end, as an afterthought, do we see an analogy between the Democrats and Galore. And it's clear to me that the are making a slam on the lack of leadership among dems as pussiness. And I agree, though the metaphor was far, far too strained.

That said, the vid is not NEARLY as stupid as the pack of hyenas reading "assassination fantasies" and sexism into it.

I think the video is amusingly creative, if a little unserious, which is how it presents itself. I don't think undecideds will take it as the meat and bones of the GOP's intelligence policy.

I took the James Bond metaphor not as an assination fantasy, but meant to ask the viewers how comfortable people are with someone as unserious as Pelosi in the role of secret agent 007.

Plus, I think "Democrats Galore" = Pussies Galore" is inside humor that the people who get it will find funny. Pussy now has a double meaning and would be much less offensive than the equivalent of Austin Powers': "Alotta Democrats," where vagina is the actual female body part.

The negative backlash stuff is just spin by the usual suspects. Editing and replay of the video to make the "Little Bo Pelosi" argument won't take people's eyes off the underlying issue.

After all, it portrays Pelosi as a vain, manipulative jerk, not a pussy. She wasn't a wimp when the spotlights were off in 2003, and she's not a wimp toward the CIA now.

What it does is call the Democrats, like Gibbs, who "won't RSVP" pussies under Pelosi.

Amateurs! Pussy Pelosi is at her most incompetent when she's at the podium and fumbling through her notes like Grandma pawing through her purse for a stick of Clark's Teaberry. Just roll the original footage and laugh.

Leave it to the RNC to have a target-rich environment of Pelosi's various equivications and contradictions and then manage to shoot themselves in the foot by not effectively using these to show a narrative.

The Bond opening sequence should lend itself to telling a story, since that is what it does in all of the movies. You just can't put random snippets together and expect normal people to put two and two together. If they could do that, they would already know that Pelosi has behaved shamefully.

Leave it to the RNC to have a target-rich environment of Pelosi's various equivocations and contradictions and then manage to shoot themselves in the foot by not effectively using these to show a narrative.

Yes, it's astonishing that they don't know to leave well enough alone -- the Democrats are out there making fools of themselves, and people realise it. This kind of thing is just counterproductive.

Wow, who thought up that ad? I mean, just the raw footage, as Dr. Althouse stated, is bad enough.

Bureaucrats and consultants! The bane of everything and the reason for dummy ads! (I'm reading Little Dorritt now and am enamored of the Dickensian anti-bureaucratic worldplay. It makes me immediately want to go out and write the bestest anti-book ever. Except. I'm lazy. And I don't know how. How DO you do that? Personally, I think it's better to turn all that natural peevishness into something clever, but instead we will end up with partisan blogs screaming. Typical*)

Hilarious! This upsets you but not the attacks on Palin, which were a hundred thousand times more egregious?

The only problem here is that Pelosi's pathetic performance, her repeated outright lies, caught on tape, and her stuttering, quivering tell-all body language as she read what she had been instructed to say.

Democrats usually get away with it. She might have if she was male. Even being a Democrat can't buy her out of this one. Filthy despicable lying....

I’m with Jason at 8:37 and Treacle. This is really amateurish, but hardly unforgivably offensive.

Also, as El Presidente pointed out: why would the RNC get in between a turf war between Congress and the CIA? The Republicans should be staying out of the crossfire and letting Panetta and Pelosi snipe at each other. But then, the RNC has not been noted for its recent brilliance.

The "suicidal Republicans" meme is getting awfully tired. I'll take an overdone Youtube video over tripling the national debt in 3 months combined with hapless attempts at rescuing entire industries through (incompetent) nationalization.

It is a dumb way to approach a serious topic on which almost any approach would have shown Pelosi to be an dolt. I heard an interesting defense of Peolosi this morning that she went in with the statement blaming the CIA to protect herself against criticism from the left, clueless that the approach of blaming the CIA would cause a problem with all but the far left.

I think political consultants and operatives are almost always overrated. It is the nature of any system where one side wins and the other side loses - the winner's skills are exagerrated [like a lawsuit where the winning lawyer is a genius and the loser a dope]. One political exception might be Carville and Stephonopolis in 1992, where they successfully hung the economy around Bush's neck and the highly flawed Clinton was elected. One courtroom exception might be Johnny Cochran when he got OJ off.

Ann is right on her assessment of the ad, but a bit unfair to the guy at Hot Air. She cuts off his quote before he said the following (which is essentially what Ann said - except for the view of who is winning):

"Even the GOP’s not that self-destructive. They are, however, evidently tone-deaf enough to cast her in the role of a generic Bond femme fatale here, which very stupidly and gratuitously injects her gender into a war they were winning."

Not since Clinton got a bj in the Oval Office has there come to pass a moment more worthy of mockery than Pelosi's press conference. Over time the subject of Clinton's bj changed into the question of Ken Starr's prurient interest. Ken Star got more ridicule in the msm than Clinton. We will see something similar happen with Pelosi's dying fall in her press conference. Republicans who mock her will, in turn, be mocked as assasination lusting, sexist, sub human scum who have no place in the civilized debate of a great society.....The Democrats never defended Clinton's behavior; they only diminished those who wished to do so. Pelosi did a terrible job in that press conference. But now the issue is the way that Republicans criticize that performance.

The "official DNC" doesn't need to do its own dirty work, they've got mainstream media doing it for them.

You know, after more than twenty years, this meme of "the mainstream media are the tools of the Democratic Party," is beyond threadbare. In fact, you wouldn't even put it on to let the dog out.

For the sake of argument, let us assume this thesis is true. A competent political party would have analyzed why they start out behind, and figure out how to either modify their message to attract journalists, or put Republicans into journalism.

But few Republicans are self-aware, apparently. They'd rather whine about their plight than do something about it.

"A competent political party would have analyzed why they start out behind, and figure out how to either modify their message to attract journalists"

Oh, I see .... Kind of like how the Democrats modified their message to attract idiots and social parasites .... if that's "competence" you can keep it. (Or maybe Republicans just don't give a shit what "journalists" think)

BTW, you could work a little harder at producing your own language when attempting to take down my comments. The snark just doesn't fly when you have to copy syntax from my 11:14am comment to respond to my 11:36am comment.

Rose - Democrats usually get away with it. She might have if she was male. Even being a Democrat can't buy her out of this one. Filthy despicable lying.....

You can't blame Pelosi for trying. It worked for Jane Harman when she was caught on tape talking with an Israel spy about obstructing justice for two Israeli-American dual citizens nailed passing classified info ...in return for enlisting Israel to pull levers inside DC to place her as Head of the Intelligence Committee. Where she assured the spy she could really help her bethren.

Outed, Harman began lying her ass off. She was never recorded, she never said it. The FBI was lying. Ok, maybe she was, but the FBI lied about what she said. Well,,,maybe she did say it, but the FBI completely misconstrued what "is" really "is" and were probably criminally culpable for wiretapping her.

All the while, Harman knew the Jewish Lobby had more power in town than the FBI, had her back, and everything would eventually be swept neatly under the rug as their clout was brought to bear.

And it was.

Pelosi trying to ape Harman's lies unfortunately overlooked that the CIA is a different kettle of fish than the FBI. The FBI is subordinate to Justice political appointees, who tend to bark and clap their flippers when the Jewish lobby makes some phone calls to various bigshot donors to the Democrat Party. The CIA is not beholden to AIPAC or Israeli officials. They have serious dirt on both groups. And the CIA does not report directly to appointed hacks as the FBI is structured to do, under Justice Dept.

So Harman gets away with it without barely raising a sweat on her lying lips, while Pelosi continues to twist in the wind.

Titus - Also, Jane Harmon takes Yoga from the most famous Yoga instructor in the world. The bitch has a rocking bod..

Become the richest member of the House, with personal trainers in Cali AND DC - and you too could have a rocking body the envy of the gay world.

Which makes me wonder what is up with wealthy but pudgy Barney Frank and the rich but downright fat Jerry Nadler. Then there is Janet Napolitano, who apparantly has confused downing a gallon of yogurt with getting down with yoga.

I can't even bring myself to watch the pathetic thing - it's just not worth my time - & I'm the sort of person who actively ENJOYS seeing the Goopers hump the poodle, so what does that tell you?

Cronyism for eight years straight must've been one hell of a partay ... & self-immolating, overpriced crap like this is the hangover. So too is the lust to "purge" the GOP of exactly those few with cooler heads who could bring more people into it, right when they need those people the most. That whole "us vs. the world" thing sounds really heroic until you realize the world doesn't play nice & it's got a hell of a weight & reach advantage.

The hurt has only just begun for the Republicans - they're failing just as badly now as an opposition as they did as incumbents, despite the benefit of a much easier task-menu, not to mention the golden opportunity of facing a government in a hard recession ... their ongoing fail-a-thon is not exactly a ringing endorsement of their ability to govern America again after 2012.

The only person who can save the GOP at this point is Barack Obama - & he'll have to make Bush Jr. look like Wittgenstein to do it.